ChasNote

At South By Southwest today, Ask A Ninja’s Kent Nichols explained how his budding media empire makes so much money: The “voodoo bullshit” performed by “sweaty people who drink,” aka, the ad-sales team at FM. While we all do our best to keep our perspiration to a minimum (no comment on drinking), he does have a point. And even if I didn’t agree with the characterization, let’s be honest: I’d never pick a fight with Ninja.

But what is it with the ad-sales-people-are-like-farm-animals stuff? Here’s Arrington at TechCrunch in a comment last week. (The original post discusses FM’s value, valuation and acquisition rumors from a few months back.) A stud?! I’m blushing.

Kent and Mike, thank you both for the kind (and evocative) words!

The Guardian UK is out with their list of favorite 50 blogs, including several official “friends of FM”:

Boing Boing: “Their dominance of the terrain where technology meets politics makes the Boing Boing crew geek aristocracy.”

TechCrunch: “Techcrunch began in 2005 as a blog about dotcom start-ups in Silicon Valley, but has quickly become one of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry.”

Dooce: “Though there were personal websites that came before hers, certain elements conspired to make Dooce one of the biggest public diaries since Samuel Pepys’s (whose diary is itself available, transcribed in blog form, at Pepysdiary.com).”

Mashable: “Founded by Peter Cashmore in 2005, Mashable is a social-networking news blog, reporting on and reviewing the latest developments, applications and features available in or for MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and countless lesser-known social-networking sites and services, with a special emphasis on functionality.”

Gaping Void: “Things started going gangbusters when he pimped his cartoons on the internet, and as he built an audience through his blog, he started writing about his other passion — the new world of understanding how to adapt marketing to the new world of the net.”